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blueberry wine

Another busy weekend, with more wine action! Or bottling action, at least. In addition to pulling up the tomatoes, planting garlic, getting a flu shot, making a big pot of chili, going to an excellent tasting at City Wine, seeing Rob Mies and his live bats at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, taking Rose for a haircut, and hitting the farmers’ market, I also bottled the blueberry wine. I was actually in kind of a rush when I did it, and a little distracted, so the process wound up being quite messy, with lots of floor wine and be-speckled cabinets. Lily was quite excited about that, but I didn’t let her clean up, because the last thing I needed was a drunk dog/trip to the emergency vet. Anyway, because of that and loss from rackings, I had a little less than 5 full bottles, but fortunately I had saved an old half-sized store-bought (cherry) country wine bottle. There was still a little wine left, so I swigged that, and it was pretty dang good. I may have to repeat this one, even though it wasn’t with free fruit.

I like this picture because you can see the color of the wine, but I’m not sure what the heck is going on with the aspect ratio. And you can only see three of the five bottles! I guess that’s what I get for being primarily a phone photographer.

This one will be Electric Blueberry, probably my last Bowie-themed wine name, or at least the last one I can think of at the moment.

The other wines I racked last week have cast a bit of sediment, so not quite ready yet. The crab apple is close, though. And I may have to give up and get some bentonite for the dandelion, as it persists in its cloudiness, even after the racking. The others I’ll give another couple of weeks and then re-rack– but I suspect this means I’ll need more half-sized bottles. I may even have to buy some. Rats.

Since I’d pulled up all those tomatoes, I also wanted to find something to do with all those green guys, so after some research, I found a recipe for green tomato-apple chutney. (After all those buckets of free apples, I bought more at the farmers’ market!) The recipe says it makes 7 pints, but I wound up with 8 pints, a full quart jar and half another pint (which I didn’t process– those are in the fridge):

. We tried some with cheese, and it’s quite nice but not at all spicy. It has chili powder in it, and I picked a hot kind, but apparently it wasn’t quite hot enough. Or maybe there just wasn’t enough to come through. Anyway, it’s still quite nice, and will be good with curries and cheeses throughout the year. I’ll serve some this week, when I host the women. And I’ll give a couple away– a person doesn’t actually need 10 pints of chutney in a year.